Midnight in St. Petersburg

by Vanora Bennett

  ‘What’s happened to you, in all these years?’ he mumbled.

  ‘Well, I got married,’ Inna began, but then doubt made her voice trail off. He hadn’t even said her name, after all, and people said he was a monster with women nowadays. He could just be talking to her because she was young and female …

  ‘To a good man,’ Father Grigory supplied helpfully, ‘whom you loved; a craftsman, you said…’

  Inna nodded, surprised and reassured.

  ‘And spirited,’ Father Grigory added with blurred approval. His eyes were a blaze of blue. ‘Not that I liked his politics, but he’s young, and the young are always a bit wild. But I could see right off he was a man of integrity. The kind who’d always be true to his beliefs.’

  He nodded several times, wistfully, as aware of how he himself had fallen. But the confusion Inna had felt when he’d started praising her husband was now turning to something nasty in the pit of her stomach.

  He wasn’t talking about Horace at all. He was remembering something else: the box of revolutionary leaflets in the lobby, the shouting in that tiny enclosed space, on another winter day, long ago.

  She took a deep breath and shut her mind to the memory. ‘Ah,’ she said, with the kind of thin social smile she had learned for evenings with the gentlemen of Fabergé. ‘A misunderstanding, I think? Because that young man went off to fight for revolution.’ Making an effort, she broadened her smile. ‘My name now is Wallick,’ she finished, with an attempt at brightness that sounded hollow, even to her.

  Father Grigory gazed at her for a moment, as if he hadn’t understood. Then he burst out laughing. ‘Oh, you married the Englishman!’ He rocked forward against the motorcar door and wiped his eyes. But he was still smiling, eyes travelling down her body, taking in her button boots and well-cut coat. ‘Well, well; now that will have got the police off your back.’

  Inna swallowed hard. She didn’t want him to see how his laugh had stung, or how disturbed she felt by the suggestion that she’d married only for papers, and had lost her innocence just as surely as this wreck of a man standing too close to her.

  She shouldn’t be talking with a dissolute drunk, she told herself, with something close to panic.

  ‘I’m so sorry we can’t talk more, but I’m in such a hurry,’ she said, beginning to retreat, in tiny steps. She was aware of a flash of fuddled surprise in Father Grigory’s eyes – those still honest eyes, unchanged, despite the ruin of his face.

  As she edged past the car, and nearer the safety of the street corner, she added, in a small voice, ‘Well, goodbye,’ before walking, straight-backed and as tall as she could make herself, round the corner.

  But once she knew he couldn’t see her, she realized there was, after all, something she should have been saying to him back there.

  She should have warned him about the rumour Horace had heard. He’d helped her, once, after all. Even if there was nothing else left for her to say to him now, she should have said that.

  She clenched her fingers into her palms, inside her glove, a gesture she often made, but whose origin she’d all but forgotten. She squared her shoulders and turned back.

  But she only got as far as the corner.

  Father Grigory was still there, leaning heavily against the open motorcar door. But there was someone else tipping out of the other side of the vehicle, making a second door creak: another man, younger and leaner, wild-eyed and bare-necked and giggling, clearly still in night-time dream-world too.

  It took her a moment to recognize Felix Youssoupoff, mostly because his hair, usually slicked down so neatly above his dandyish, tailored clothes, was standing up like a scarecrow’s.

  Inna drew into the shadow of a doorway, trying to make her fogged mind work normally. If it hadn’t been for the rumour, she might not have found it so strange that these two had been out drinking together, because Munya had introduced them once, hadn’t she? Thinking back, she felt briefly sorry for Munya, who must have assumed that Father Grigory’s virtue would rub off on to Felix. Looking at them now, you could see that it had all happened the other way around.

  Inna hesitated, not wanting to rush back now she had seen Felix, so she saw the stumble as Felix staggered around the car, saw Father Grigory guffawing, then leaning down and hauling up his drinking-mate, then slipping himself, into the same yellow-grey pile of pavement snow. They were too drunk to care. She heard the princely whinny of laughter, and then she saw Felix pushing Father Grigory’s head back against the wheel of the motorcar, and bringing his own face close; saw the older man’s acquiescence, the straggle of hair, the rough hand wavering on the slimmer, smarter back. And she also saw the chauffeur’s shoulders, inside the car, rigid with embarrassment. He’d been there all along.

  She turned away, hating Felix Youssoupoff, the triumphant possessor, the casual corrupter, the robber of virtue, but also relieved that the latest rumour had been so wrong, and that it was kissing, not killing, that she’d been witnessing. She felt relieved, too, as she started lifting and lowering her feet to plod carefully, winter fashion, through the brown city snow towards the Lemans’, that she now had something else to occupy her mind instead of that disturbing laugh of his, which, just for a moment, had made her so unsure about the way her own life had turned out.

  * * *

  Madame Leman was knitting in the yellow room, under her husband’s portrait. She was sitting by the window, for the light, such as it was, but she also had a lamp pulled up close. There were balls of white wool everywhere, spilling out of her knitting basket and on to the chair and floor. She had a knitting needle skewering up her carelessly piled ashy hair.

  She didn’t get up when she saw Inna – she wasn’t as nimble on her feet as before – but her eyes and face wrinkled into her familiar warm smile and she broke into talk as quickly and eagerly as ever. ‘You poor darling. You look exhausted. I do admire you. Was it a harrowing night? Marcus is downstairs already, but stay a minute. There’s tea just coming. Agrippina is bringing it.’ She patted the cushions, and Inna slumped down beside her, glad of the still heat of the room and the soporific flash and click of the needles, on which another tiny matinée jacket back was taking shape.

  But when Madame Leman got to the end of the next row, a moment later, she put her work down in her lap and reached into the basket to pull out a bundle wrapped loosely in tissue paper.

  She held it out to Inna with a different kind of smile – one in which Inna couldn’t help seeing a vulnerability she didn’t remember from the old days, a helpless, wordlessly imploring hope.

  It made Inna’s heart sink. There’d been more and more of this, recently.

  Gently, she took the package from her, unwrapped it and shook it out: a fluffy white baby blanket, knitted in a complicated lacy pattern.

  ‘It’s beautiful. However did you do it so fast?’ she said, trying to infuse her words with enthusiasm, while picturing in her mind the increasingly packed drawer of baby knits she already had at home, knowing too that the hope Madame Leman could only express in white angora was all she had left to sustain her, now that her beloved husband was dead, and Marcus, back from the war, was limping around on one leg, trying to make the business work with only Inna to help.

  Madame Leman wasn’t to know that the angora made Inna’s soul itch, because Inna wasn’t planning to have a baby, and was grateful that Horace understood her hesitation; agreed, even.

  At the beginning, in fact, when Horace had still wanted her to train as a professional violinist, he’d been the one to say they should wait until she’d had a career. ‘You’re so young,’ she remembered him saying. Even now, the memory of his voice echoed tenderly in her heart. ‘You need time to live life for yourself before you give yourself up to caring for others.’

  Horace had only slowly given up on trying to make a violinist of her. For months he’d hung around with a dreamy look on his face whenever she practised in the quiet of the evening, until, feeling oppressed by his attention, she’d
stopped playing unless he was out. After a while she’d all but stopped taking her instrument out at all, even when she was by herself. Though she didn’t like to say this to him, she had no real desire to turn herself into yet another freakish Wunderkind – that cliché of the concert halls, a talented young Jew escaping the shtetl through music. But most of all, playing the violin – and that violin in particular – reminded her of a time and a person she didn’t want to go back to.

  By the time the war came they had reached a tacit agreement about her playing. It had been an easy decision then not to bring children into a world that was turning so dark. Look how love for their son has turned everything inside out for the Lemans, she’d said, and Horace had nodded. During those first months of the war, when Marcus had gone off and volunteered for the army in spite of – maybe because of – his father’s years of laughing at soldiering, Inna had seen how distraught the Lemans had been; and how even more utterly beside themselves when they’d read in the newspaper that his entire regiment had been killed. Walked into a marsh by their idiot general, who hadn’t checked the lie of the land and, when the German planes came with their machine guns, slaughtered. Almost every soldier had sunk into the swamp under the strafing and never been seen again – except, as it turned out after days of frantic visits to ministries, and influential acquaintances, and telegrams, and telephone calls, Marcus. He’d hung on to a bush and, by a miracle, limped out that night with only a minor leg wound. It should have been a story with a happy ending, but it had taken weeks to get him off a station floor to a field hospital behind the lines, and weeks more, as winter fell, to get him here. And in that time, the gangrene had taken hold and spread.

  But Marcus was lucky, Inna reflected now. He could have been that other boy, last night, dying, in fear, away from his family, in a hospital cot. Marcus had lost a leg, but lived.

  Yet it was agonizing to remember Monsieur and Madame Leman shrivelling and ageing so fast in those dreadful months. Their fear for their child kept them so busy that no one even stopped to wonder why Monsieur Leman’s belly was shrinking so fast, and his appetite going, and he had those pains in the gut all the time, until it was too late. By the time Marcus finally got home, his father was dead and buried. Madame Leman – whose frivolous pre-war fondness for séances and spiritualist gatherings had gone, replaced by grim attendance at soldiers’ mothers’ protest meetings against the criminal inadequacy of the authorities – took one look at the gaunt son who pegged in through the door, unannounced, and fainted.

  Even now that Marcus was home again, there was no time, or space, or money for babies. Work was sporadic. Musicians still played, but in these hard times they thought twice before having their instruments expensively repaired, and no one bought new ones. But when work did come in, you absolutely had to be available to do it fast, and well, and cheaply. Inna couldn’t leave Marcus on his own, at least not until after Barbarian finished school next year and they could start getting him trained too. They needed her in the workshop, not having babies and changing nappies.

  There’s a lot in what you say, Horace would always reply when she said this to him. He went along with everything. Sometimes, Inna thought, he sounded relieved. Perhaps he enjoyed cosseting her as if she were a child. Maybe it felt easier for him, too. Would he be able to go on enjoying the life of the mind if he became a father? Even though the Stray Dog had closed its doors forever, and the war had taken away so many of the artists she’d once known there, he still went out with Marcus to meet the very youngest generation of avant-garde writers and sculptors and artists whom Marcus had gone to school with, and came back laughing over their audacious experiments. He bought their radical works of art to decorate the apartment: nonsense poems by Futurists and Supremacists pinned to walls, stick-men drawings, and his favourite (Leman’s favourite, once) the sacrilegious red and black square in the icon corner. Might he not be scared too of the changes to his playful life that a baby might bring?

  She liked to think her decision not to have a child was simply because she so enjoyed being babied by Horace that she wanted to stay suspended for as long as possible in this moment, enjoying the tenderness of their life as a couple; enjoying the certainty that she would never be alone again.

  She didn’t want to think there might be something else holding her back.

  She never mentioned Yasha. No one did. And if, sometimes, when Horace was out, she did get out her violin, and, very softly, play a Strauss waltz, just to herself, and cry a little, it wasn’t for Yasha, because her life today was complete without him. The melancholy sense of emptiness that came over her at these rare moments was the sadness that had come into everyone’s lives. It wasn’t personal.

  ‘It goes with the little bonnet I made last week, do you see?’ Madame Leman was saying. ‘It’s the same wool. I was so lucky to be able to buy so much of it, so cheap.’

  Inna leaned over and kissed her cheek, privately thankful that there was so little of the wool left. ‘Soon, maybe,’ she said, in answer to the question in the other woman’s eyes. ‘It’s all in God’s hands, isn’t it?’

  This was a deceiving phrase, as Inna both knew and chose not to know at the same time. Perhaps she had lost her honesty; perhaps she was morally compromised.

  * * *

  By the time the tiredness kicked in, the dawn encounter with Father Grigory seemed almost a dream. She told Horace about it while they were walking home in the grey dusk, her head on his shoulder.

  At least, she told him about part of it. She left out the conversation they’d had, especially what Father Grigory had implied about her marrying him for papers. Horace might misunderstand.

  When Horace heard about the drunken kiss, he shook his head, rather sadly. He said, ‘They call it “making mistakes in grammar” at court, you know, those young men’s follies. But I thought it would all stop when he married.’

  It was an effort to keep her feet going as they turned off Nevsky, away from the ragged, resentful crowds, on to the long sweep of cavalry exercise ground that fronted their building. She was aching with fatigue. ‘Anyway,’ she sighed wearily. ‘You should be pleased, with all the other things you were fearing.’

  Horace laughed, and held her tighter in his one-armed walking hug. ‘I tell you what, though. I’m going to hurry up and finish that last box I’m making Felix for his wife’s Christmas present before he gets into more trouble. And I’ll take payment, too!’

  He turned her into their courtyard, swung her towards him, and closed his other arm around her. She breathed in the scent of him, and laughed softly back, trying to forget. They’d be inside in a moment, sinking into quilts in golden lamplight. This was what she’d chosen. This was what there was. It was enough.

  * * *

  The fears she’d set aside only surfaced again when, the next Friday, sitting in the ward in the middle of the night while the men in their rickety cots tossed and groaned, Inna heard the crack of breaking glass and shots out on the street, loud and close enough to startle her out of her doze.

  It’s the sixteenth, she thought with the confused dread of someone not sure whether they’re waking or sleeping. Horace’s face flashed into her mind, with the expression of foreboding he’d had when he’d told her about the fat MP singing in the Duma press room, ‘Remember the date, brothers.’

  But when she ventured out to see what was happening, no one else was stirring. All she could hear, from somewhere far away in the palace, beyond the hospital wing, was the distant sound of dance music on a gramophone. She’d heard the English words of that chirpy song before: ‘Yankee Doodle’. Whoever was playing it must like it a lot; it had been repeating for hours. Still, no one seemed to mind. The night watchman was asleep in the ward corridor.

  And, although at later moments during that night – while she changed wet sheets, and mopped bloodied floors, and held boys’ bandaged hands, and told them they would be all right, and get home safely to their mothers – or, sometimes, that she would be wi
th them, right here, whatever happened – she had the vague sense that there were more motorcars outside than usual, revving and backfiring and rushing about, and more people shouting and banging on doors down in the street.

  She looked up at the vast chandelier, with its hundreds of crystal drops, imagining it lit and blazing above a crowd of alternately dark-shouldered and bare-shouldered dancers, all jigging elegantly in time to the perky rhythms of ‘Yankee Doodle’. So many things seemed so unreal, so often, in this dreamlike place, inhabited only by people suspended between peace and war, death and life, between the howling darkness outside and the calm stillness of home.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Horace kept the newspaper he’d been reading open as he came through the workshop’s street door.

  ‘Look,’ he said, urgently. He jabbed his finger at the little paragraph of late news.

  Of course you couldn’t understand a word of it. The censors had been at it.

  All you could tell from this paragraph was that something had happened.

  A certain person visited another person with some other persons. After the first person vanished, one of the other persons stated that the first person had not been at the house of the second person, although it was known that the second person had visited the first person late at night.

  Horace wanted to see how the others reacted without putting ideas into their heads. He was half hoping someone would come up with a different, better explanation. He wanted to be wrong. Inna must know what he was thinking: last night had been 16 December. Inna had been at the Youssoupoff palace. If anything unusual had been going on there, she’d have said, wouldn’t she? And she wasn’t saying anything. She was just yawning and rubbing her red-rimmed eyes – she was always so tired by this time on a Saturday. She shook her head, as if she didn’t want to think.

  Marcus, though more alert, looked mystified too. ‘No, I’ve no idea at all what that’s about,’ he said. ‘But Mama will. Now she’s got so political, she’s always good for a guess.’